With no newspaper and only intermittent internet access — my sister thinks I come to see her just for her wireless connection — I’m behind on the news.

Still, at the USA Today level of most Americans, I pick up the gist. I see consumers expect lawmakers to do something about high gasoline prices. Unlike, say, doing something about it ourselves.

One way to pay less, which doesn’t rely on government intervention, is to spend less.

Some years ago, I became attached to Fuller’s ESB, an excellent bitter. My local liquor store offered it at a price just a dollar above my then current favorite brew. For a year or more, I drank little else and enjoyed each bottle.

One day, the price went up to $9.99 a six-pack. The store could no longer buy it at a favorable price, they told me. I switched brands with some regret, but without a letter to my Congressman.

We can’t simply change brands when gas prices rise, but we can drink less of it.

Maybe oil companies are gouging now and maybe not. Maybe they’re just toughening us up for the future — something government is loath to do, unless you’re already on welfare. We can beat up ExxonMobil all we want; the price of gasoline is ultimately heading in only one direction.

***

Over the last several weeks, I have watched great gouts of my good fortune pass into the pockets of local tradesmen. At times, there were 16 or more vehicles surrounding the house. Vacation acquires a different flavor when so many people are working and you are not.

In the past two weeks I have had the opportunity to write checks for roofers, tilers, stonemasons, trim carpenters, cabinet makers, painters, appliance installers, plumbers, electricians, countertop and granite men, carpeters, stucco crews, door and glass men, furniture deliverymen, the contractor, plus dumpster and portatoilet services. The architects, structural engineers, surveyors, framers, water and power companies, excavators, lumber yard, concrete pourers, lighting contractors, insulators, floor layers, plasterers, painters and a few others have collected. The pavers, patio finishers, floor sealers, sound and security guys, landscapers and cleaners will come in after we leave.

It occurs to me I’ve been witnessing one conservative argument for tax cuts. Give individuals more of their money to spend as they see fit and they will pour it back into the economy, creating jobs and spreading prosperity in their communities.

It’s true, most of the money from my checks will bounce around this town for a while, buying groceries, making truck payments and putting new roofs on sheds before ending up in China or Saudi Arabia. But money spent by the government doesn’t just disappear into a black hole. It, too, moves around creating jobs and getting re-spent in the community.

The investment argument is true but a phony distinction; it’s a more acceptable way to say “I want to spend more of my money on myself and less that benefits people I may not know or like.”

***

In designing and siting this house, we tried to have a minimal impact on the land and to be very energy efficient. Yet it hasn’t been that simple. The geothermal system we chose will use the earth’s constant temperature to reduce the amount of energy required to heat and cool the house. But it costs much more up front. In addition, it requires a sizable excavation to bury the pipes that circulate water underground. This collides with another goal — to disturb as little as possible of the fragile desert soil, which features cryptobiotic growths that take decades to form and may be centuries old.

In the end, only a relatively small area was disturbed. And in a setting featuring geologic formations millions of years old, what’s a hundred years? But is century-old, one inch-high ground cover less valuable because it isn’t an old oak tree?

A reasonable proportion of the packaging, scrap materials, pallets and other detritus hauled away from the construction site were recyclable. In the winter, a wood burning neighbor carried away wood scraps, but not recently. A shovel with a broken handle is headed for the landfill. So are the sturdy plastic buckets containing the stucco mix, though I retrieved half a dozen and the stonemasons are using another dozen. How many hundred plastic bottles have landed in the dumpster?

And I paid for it all to be hauled away. There won’t be a next time, but if there were, I’d build some waste recycling clause into the contract.

And all those pickups. They could not get here by public transit, and no doubt they need to haul materials and tools on occasion. But for this job, could they have truck pooled?

The first section of Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy advances the idea that the US is facing a unique convergence of looming crises that he calls the Five Countdowns. Experts in the respective fields have independently pegged the 2010s as a critical period for America. (Well, experts in four fields. The predictors of the second coming don't have a great track record.)

The Five Countdowns from American Theocracy

I'm writing this without the book in front of me, so the summary description contains some of my thoughts as well as his. [The graphic is mine as well.]

Oil. Oil keeps breaking through mythical price barriers, most recently, $70 a barrel. Crude priced at $100 a barrel will loose all sorts of global mischief aimed at cornering remaining reserves. There will not be enough Priuses on the road to head off serious conflict among nations.

Retiree expense. Phillips names only Medicare and Social Security funding as the potential 2010s challenges that could overtax government. But I'd throw in increased pension defaults from bankrupt private companies and growing public employee pension and benefit obligations that could put a big strain on government's ability to fund the rest of its activities.

Credit. America's international indebtedness is expected to continue growing. Domestically, consumers are still living off borrowed money as if their credit cards and home equity mortgages belonged to someone else. And it stands to reason that the housing bubble that didn't happen in 2005 still awaits. Who's gonna buy $450,000 starter homes in 2015? Surely not the benefitless kids making $8 an hour at Best Buy or Target.

Climate change. The DoD commissioned a preparedness study that looked at the security implications of abrupt climate change. The title the consultants picked for their scenario — "The Weather Report: 2010-2020." Sudden changes in temperature have occurred in the past; even if this doesn't happen, only technology-can-save-us zealots are looking for climate-related conditions to hold steady over the next 15 years. Naturally, the Bush Administration downplayed the prediction, unlike the next one.

End Times. Christ and the Anti-christ will be duking it out over Babylon, as has been predicted at various times over the past two millenia. But this time, the forces all seem arrayed for confrontation in the Holy Land. No point in worrying about the other four countdowns. This is the Big One.

In this summary, Phillips hardly touches the perpetual war on terror, which will continue to run up a huge price tag, regardless of whether Lucifer's Legions join the fray. In short, we're in for an unsettled 15 years in which the planet and the dollar are imperiled, and folks in the driver's seat don't seem to have a long planning horizon.

In the next chapter, Phillips lays out in great detail a case that the sectification of Christianity in America is not a new phenomenon, but a steadily gathering wave that has been a feature of our history from the beginning. America started with religious rebels and refugees, and the trend here has always been away from the establishment, mainline religions to the fringier sects that emphasize personal salvation and fervent, but less-than-rigorous study of scripture. The ascent of evangelicals and penecostals in public life is not new, he argues, but the tip of a centuries-long process.

What's worrisome now is that the live and let live spirit that permitted the flowering of so many denominations is starting to break down as the religious radicals assume power.

Out here in western Colorado, this fragmentation is far more evident than in Lutheran land. No denomination has been able to dominate, but there have been some powerful minorities outside the maintstream, including Assembly of God (John Ashcroft's church), Mormons, and a host of pentecostals — Foursquare Gospel, Church of God, Church of the Bretheren, Nazarenes, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses.

I'll keep filing book reports. See here and here and also here for previous installments.

Guests have gone, and now back to Kevin Phillips and American Theocracy.

The prevailing view of why Dick Cheney insisted on secrecy about the discussions in his National Energy Policy Development Group was its heavy weighting toward coal, oil and gas interests. Cheney said he needed confidentiality to ensure unvarnished advice. Environmentalists envisioned stogy-smoking fat cats colluding over how to carve up American wilderness.

Phillips suggests another, much stronger motivation — and it wasn’t to protect discussions about drilling in ANWR. It was about the melding of oil and national security interests in the Middle East.

UN Sanctions against Iraq were preventing the country from exporting much of its oil or from receiving

competitive foreign investments. So long as the United States and Britain could keep these sanctions in place, using allegations concerning weapons of mass destruction, Saddam could not implement his own plan to extend large-scale oil concessions (estimated to be worth $1.1 trillion) to French, Russian, Chinese and other oil companies. Most analysts concluded that he hoped to enlist those three nations, which had seats on the UN Security Council, to get the sanctions lifted.

Cheney’s group, says Phillips, “pursued a mandate, in collaboration with the National Security Council, to deal with rogue states and ‘actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.’”

Middle East maps and documents used by the group showed how Iraq had divvied up its largely untapped oil fields for projects pending with more than 60 firms from 30 countries.

America and Britain were interested in keeping the sanctions from being lifted and those deals from happening. France, with a pending agreement to get access to a 25-billion-barrel oil field, was among those nations unwilling to see Iraq become an “oil protectorate-cum-military base” dominated by the US.

Freedom haters.

Sure, the oil companies might advise Cheney on how to further exploit dwindling US reserves. But their real interest was likely how to gain control of the juicy Iraqi territories, where only 2,300 wells had been drilled, compared to a million in Texas.

As Secretary of Defense after the first Gulf War, Cheney gave Halliburton a contract to study privatization of certain Pentagon functions, then he took the CEO job. During his few years at the helm, Cheney presided over Halliburton’s transformation into “a major ‘energy war’ contractor and, partly because of Cheney’s connections, a private-sector bridge between the oil industry and the military industrial complex.”

Seen in this context, the simplest explanation — for the invasion of Iraq and the unprecedented reliance on private contractors for defense functions — remains the best. Forget WMD, spreading freedom, revenge for Saddam plotting against Pops, wanting to show up the old man, or even bringing about the End Times.

It’s about oil. Oil for you and me.

Bush and Cheney may be all in favor of profits for US oil companies. But that’s not reason enough for a nation to go to war, even for oilmen like them. Oil is, and energy in one form or another always has been.

It just hasn’t been a very good cause to ask young men and women to die for.

So of course our leaders lie to us. Even though they believe they’re doing the right thing, they can’t speak the truth.

My wife, who’s too busy to be a blogger, pointed out last night that she and I have a civil union.

So do the other three couples at dinner with us. None had been “married” in a church; two were united by civil officials and the other two celebrated in non-denominational services conducted in secular settings by rent-a-ministers. (Ours was ordained, but he was really a theater producer who ran a college ecumenical center.)

We think it’s time for people like us to start speaking up for recognition of civil unions. Not just on behalf of gays and lesbians, but for people living in committed, long-term unions that only fit the zealots’ definition of marriage because the participants are a man and a woman.

Then let those who want marriage as the Bible intended it have their holy matrimony — and forever hold their peace.

REG at Minvolved asks What's Wrong with the DFL Endorsement? The short answer, the party lacks "an infallible message, a series of clear policy ideas that can be sold
to citizens and ... candidates who can do the dirty work of
campaigning."

For the past several months, I've been working with Growth & Justice on a project that may help address the first two points. Growth & Justice is a progressive economic think tank committed to making Minnesota's economy simultaneously more prosperous, fair and environmentally sustainable. And its latest project is developing a New Economic Agenda for the state — a shared vision supported by a framework of progressive principles, policy ideas and measurable outcomes. Not to mention a common language.

It's still a work in progress, but you can get a glimpse of some of the ideas we're working with at The Test Tank.

The Test Tank looks like a blog, since it's hosted on Blogger, but right now it's simply a discussion forum for ideas that may become part of a progressive Minnesota agenda based on prosperity, sustainability, economic justice and fiscal discipline. Think of it as a chance to join a think tank for a day.

We'll add new questions every week or so. Take a look and leave your comments. The first two questions are:

Has state government forgotten the difference between spending and investing?Could agreement on key outcomes and measures of success help us agree on state spending?

Back in the Land of Involuntary Limbaugh Listening, I hear this gem: "We haven't been attacked since we went into Iraq, and still the president's approval rating is only 36%." Depends, of course, on your definition of "attacked."

And this: "Duke is a very liberal university..." which should explain if not rape itself, the university's reaction to allegations of rape. Either way, the Duke LaCrosse team becomes a liberal problem.

DFL gubernatorial candidate Steve Kelley will be joining Drinking Liberally Wednesday, April 19th. Due to a scheduling conflict he will be arriving at 5:30 and answering questions and meeting the group until 7 pm — 331 Club, 13th and University in Northeast Minneapolis.

Time magazine ranks the Senators, picking the ten best and the five worst. This section has all the editorial caloric content of the obligatory "Annual Best of" issues that allow editors a month off planning any real stories and give the ad directors something to sell.

Senators don't advertise in Time, but picking the 15 guarantees that newspapers in at least 15 states will promote the April 24 issue.

That hardly seems enough to make the bottom five, so let me add texture. Someone who works in the Federal Building here in Grand Junction watched Allard get off the elevator last year and not know which direction his office was. Now, he has five district offices in the state, but is it that hard for a third-term Senator to find his way around?

P.S. Allard is a veterinarian. Too bad we can't replace him with Ford Bell. Dayton's only real problem was he wasn't a politician or a pontificator — or is that two problems?

The great success of Cindy Sheehan's protest, therefore, is no less
than the moral authority for the Democratic Party to speak for the
American family.

In other words, there are now two very clear claims on the American
family at the heart of politics, and the claim by the anti-War
Democrats has so much momentum that it has already forced every single
Republican candidate running for office to rethink their strategies for
the next few years.

At the heart of the Republican claim to speak for the family is a
very narrow idea of marriage, and a reactionary nervousness about 'the
culture' as a cause for social problems in America. For the
Republicans, the key to translating this claim into political gains has
been a broad scale effort to use state legislators to strip homosexuals
of the full rights and privileges of American citizenship.

At the heart of the Democratic claim to speak for the family is a
broad and powerful idea that the war in Iraq is killing America's
children for no apparent reason, and a growing anger than unless
American soldiers leave Iraq, America's hard-working and honest
communities will be destroyed forever. – Jeffrey Feldman, The Frameshop

Feldman may have been right when he wrote this last August, but Sheehan is wearing thin. I can't decide whose uber-exposure is more annoying — Sheehan's or Tom Cruise's. (I didn't even have to look hard for this page.)Sheehan has gone from the grieving mother to a packaged protestor who may still actually be composing her own screeds, but I wonder. This smacks of the work of a second-string PR flack who's trying too hard:

Fresh
from a resounding victory in Iraq, George Bush swaggered onto the deck
of the USS Abraham Lincoln and boldly and confidently declared victory.
It was a pretty war, it was a clean war, it looked stunning in all of
its shock and awe. Wow, never was there such a swift and amazing
American victory and it all looked so damn glamorous on CNN!

As
fake as his codpiece was, so was his "cakewalk" of an invasion. Over
two thousand dead soldiers, billions of wasted dollars, and thousands
of maimed young people later, with innocent Iraqis dead by the hundreds
of thousands and still no consistent electricity or clean water in
their country, this swaggering imbecile of a "leaker in chief" has the
nerve to be trying to sell all of us on a new war in Iran.

Do
the warped neo-cons with their puppet president think that we are all
stupid? Fool us once, shame on us, fool us ... well, we just can't be
fooled again.

As for Cruise, how phenomenonally fascinating after fathering two children already that he has personally discovered birth classes:

We’ve been doing seminars with the family just to educate them. Running seminars so we can understand what Kate’s going through,
and for Kate to understand it. Things like how to take care of a
pregnant woman and get ready for the birth. We have also been studying
what happens after the birth and how to take care of the baby.

I wonder if Tom's seminars covered how to protect his pregnant love's tongue when they're out ridingmotorcycles:

Her smile
drives me crazy in a good way. She has this thing that she does with
her tongue when she smiles. When she’s really laughing when her tongue
sticks out … and it’s the cutest thing. But when we’re riding
motorcycles, I tell her look, please don’t stick your tongue out. If we
hit a bump or anything I get a little bit nervous.

These are people out of their depth.

Like my old high school chemistry teacher who made the local paper for getting blown off a Minuteman border patrol scaffold down in Texas.

He
told students he would have recused himself if the case [before the Supreme Court] had involved
Cheney personally, but that he viewed the situation differently because
the vice president was acting in his official capacity.

"I think the proudest thing I have done on the bench is not allow myself to be chased off that case," Scalia said.

I don't think for a minute that a hunting trip with Cheney would have any bearing on how Scalia would rule on that case. He's already hardwired.

But his distinction between personal relationship and official capacity is a pretty weak rationale for doing whatever he wants. Directors of boards are schooled that avoiding conflict of interest includes avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest — because either erodes trust. Such policies are not about a director's personal integrity; they're about maintaining trust in the institution.

If Scalia doesn't get that, we should get a new justice.

People with real integrity don't proclaim their courage. They just do what's right.